


Some Translation Required

by waldorph



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 14:36:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8988067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waldorph/pseuds/waldorph
Summary: Spock was able, at any given moment, to understand at least 50% of whatever it was Montgomery Scott was doing at any given moment.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [leupagus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leupagus/gifts).



> For the prompt: Trek - the idea that the rest of the Federation is just side-eyeing humans all the time and Spock usually spends most of his vacations debriefing various Vulcans who were like "and then they did WHAT? and doing the Vulcan equivalent of rubbing their eyes in disbelief the whole time. In fact if the story was just Spock having to explain shit to the Vulcan High Council and the VHC kept comming other species like "dude you gotta hear this it's NUTS" that would be great

Spock did not have Nyota’s sensitivity and aptitude for language. He spoke 8, most of them conversant, fluent in 4, and could get by in a dozen or so others. He was not recognized among Vulcans as exceptional, it was in fact the very least that a son of an Ambassador could do. What Spock excelled at, and was recognized for, was that he was deeply, deeply fluent in Earthling. It was not a language all its own, in fact if anything it was a dialect which spanned Earth’s myriad languages. Spock was able, at any given moment, to understand at least 50% of whatever it was Montgomery Scott was doing at any given moment.

Someday Spock was going to write a paper about just how important nonverbal signals were to Earthlings, and how perhaps it was necessary to reevaluate the species for a degree of empathy on level with a low-bandwidth psi sensitivity. He was going to explain that Earthling conversation relied deeply on its historical roots, and the reason it was so frustrating for those first being exposed to it was due to the fact that it assumed a degree of fluency and flexibility. Earthlings had been effective at exporting their culture, and so most humanoid races seemed to understand Earthlings where Vulcans and Illyri and varying other species were often left staring at the fragile human in their midst who was struggling to their feet and saying, “That all you got?”

Spock thought if he could publish something which explained Earthlings, he would stop having to have these conversations.

He would also probably win the Intergalactic Peace Prize and be able to retire off of the speaking fees alone. Of course, if money were an object, Spock would have gone into something far more lucrative than Starfleet.

“It was wedged--damaged,” T’Rei, a Vulcan High Councilor and Board Member at the Vulcan Science Academy, was saying in her sharply precise voice. “And giving off radiation at lethal levels.”

“Yes,” Spock agreed, pouring himself another cup of tea. They were arranged in a conference room at Starfleet, where Dr. McCoy had just given a highly-edited version of his How-To-Revive-Jim-Kirk-After-He-Dies-of-Radiation speech, and Spock had been thoroughly unsurprised to find his presence requested by the Vulcan attendees--indeed, even the non-attendees were here, because though they would always deny it, Vulcans loved a good “The Earthling Did What?” story.

“He kicked it,” Spock edified. Jim had had hairline fractures in all of his leg bones, and his right hip had need some regeneration as well. McCoy had been furious about that, as well.

“Kicked it,” she repeated, and the other four members shifted in their seats.

“Oh yes,” Spock agreed blithely. “Repeatedly.”

Of course the end result had been Jim’s death, so Spock didn’t have the fond feeling he had about most of the other ridiculous Earthling tricks his crew performed.

“And then tried to outrun the radiation?” she pressed.

“I believe he was attempting to make the retrieval of his body as safe as possible,” Spock said.

“So he did know he would die,” T’Rav said.

“It was never in question,” Spock said. He might have wondered, had he not been present when Jim’s eyes had opened after they’d taken him out of cryo, Kahn’s blood pumping in his veins. He had looked bemused, and then resigned, as though this had only confirmed something for him, but then the smile had split his lips, and he had accused McCoy of attempting to freeze him to death.

“Well, they are…” Senn searched for a word, “innovative.”

“Oh yes,” Spock agreed. “Quite.”

* * *

“Will you tell him--” Scott demanded as Spock stepped into Engineering. Spock thought to himself that if he never had to intervene between the Chief Science Officer and Captain, it would still be too soon. In crisis situations, however, he was less inclined to become involved.

“Shut up, it’ll work,” Jim argued, and Scott huffed and stared at the console over Jim’s shoulder. Spock shot an enquiring look at Keenser, who shrugged: Chances of death were only fair-to-middling, currently.

“Aye, yes okay, I see-, but no, then you’d have blowback,” Scott was saying earnestly. Spock counted in his head: _Three….two…._

“So just bypass it and divert the output,” Jim said, as though this was the most obvious suggestion, much like suggesting if someone expressed hunger that they should eat. Behind him, the Vulcan engineer and the Romulan prisoner were broadcasting deep distress. “Wait--can we weaponize it? I mean we’ve got to offload the charge anyway, can we somehow--”

“No, no, no!” Scott snapped at him, and then paused and got a distant, almost whimsical look on his face. “Well.”

Keenser pointed at the smooth metal pointedly, and when he didn't get a proper response he grabbed Scott's hand and dragged it over. Scott jerked his hand away just prior to contact and then said, glowering,

"Well obviously the cooling element has to be boosted, so why don't you go do that, eh?"

Keenser stared at him, and then at Spock, in what clearly was despair about their imminent death by Earthlings, and went to go address the issue of rerouting power through the cooling unit without eliminating the possibility of using it.

 _"Captain, we're caught in the well and whatever you just did let us get to the lip, but not far enough out of it,"_ Sulu reported. _“And the Carturi are still out there, presumably waiting to push us back in if we do get out.”_

"I mean, that worked last time," Jim said to no one in particular. Spock narrowed his eyes at him, because he was was at least conversant in Earthling now.

"We were in range of rescue last time, and the same is not necessarily true now. Additionally, this is not a situation where it would behoove us to sacrifice our ability to accelerate; inertial motion will only achieve so much."

Scott made a considering face and began muttering to himself over the console. Ensign Arrhae, only recently graduated from the Academy, was looking like if he had a god, he would be in fervent prayer. Saak simply looked resigned to death.

Jim looked at Spock. Spock stared back at him, waiting. For all Montgomery Scott's genius with the Enterprise, she was Kirk's ship, and he was her captain, and Spock had long ago given up rationalizing that. There was a particular shade of blue that Jim’s eyes went when he came up with one of his more insane ideas. Spock had also given up rationalizing that.

"No," Spock said.

"You know you want to see it," Jim argued, as Scott looked between them eagerly.

"Your plan, instead of running, or finding some other way out of this, is to fall further into the nebula, and then to set it on fire?"

Behind him, Arrhae made a tortured small sound.

"Oh, is that what we're doing?" Scott asked, perking up.

"No," Spock said.

"It's gonna be fun," Jim promised, clapping Spock on the shoulder and jogging ahead to the transporter. Spock exhaled. Perhaps jettisoning themselves through the nebula and _then_ igniting it...

Ultimately, the most frustrating thing about Earthlings was that they seemed to be single-handedly making a case for the existence of luck, Spock reflected as he watched the Carturi ships careen through the nebula, caught in their own inertial pull and burning with a sickly purple flame.

"Excellent work," Jim congratulated the crew.

Spock had long-since stopped looking to Nyota for a moment of incredulity. She was, after all, an Earthling. In fact, he was more likely to share commiseration with Dr. McCoy, which was too horrifying to contemplate and so Spock kept his glances to himself.

“Might I suggest Warp 5?” he asked instead, and Jim grinned at him brightly and said,

“Mr. Sulu, Warp 5 to keep Mr. Spock happy.”

“My pleasure, Sir,” Sulu replied.

Spock went down to the lower decks recreational room, where undoubtedly Saak and Arrhae and the other newer members of the crew would be waiting to pepper him with questions which all amounted to “What the hell just happened?”.

* * *

What Earthlings meant, when they said, "It can't be done", was not that a thing was impossible. It was that they had not yet figured out how to achieve it, and were inviting everyone around them to prove them wrong. He marveled, sometimes, that his own ancestors had looked at this particular race and thought, _Yes, we will ally with them._ Though he supposed the pacifist's best friend was the indiscriminate loose canon. People generally reconsidered violence against one when they knew that they would face retribution in a form they could not possibly anticipate.

It was akin to the way Spock had always felt safest when Sybok was around. People were less likely to pick on Spock when Sybok was nearby and perfectly willing to launch himself at a much-smaller child with unspeakable wrath.

Spock wondered if his affinity for humans was a result of his exposure to his brother, and not his mother.

Perhaps a combination.

Whatever it was, Earthlings rarely saw sense, and they saw the words "don't" and "can't" and even "shouldn't" as challenges to be surmounted, not guidelines to abide by.

Spock was not against it, as a principle. He just wished they would stop doing it when there were Vulcans aboard. He could almost suspect Jim of doing it on purpose, given the cheerful way Jim waved him off to go speak with their guests after every single incident.

"But how did they know it would work?" Saev pressed for the fourth time. Spock considered him and though that if he never heard that question again it would be too soon.

"They did not know it would work," he said. "They wanted it to work, and the math did not indicate any immediate consequence, and so they tried."

Stonn stared at him. "But they--they had no way of knowing that there was not a trap waiting for them."

"It was judged that they would be able to address that issue if it came to that," Spock said.

"But I was there," T'Laris protested, and indeed she had been on board the routine transport mission that went inevitably wrong. "They did not speak of that. In fact, a great deal of that conversation was not verbal."

"Earthlings rely on pre-established patterns of conversation and a history of interaction to inform current interaction," Spock said. "It is one of the few ways in which they express efficiency."

The three Vulcans exchanged looks. "Be that as it may--"

"If I may," Spock interrupted, because he had things to do which did not involve explaining the latest Stupid Earthling Trick. "The reason that Earthling humans are effective is the myriad ways in which they do not accept the comforts of the known. It is deeply entrenched, across all of their cultures, that to stagnate is to be consumed or killed. Innovation has always been their motivator, and there are examples in the planet's history which reinforce this lesson. That, coupled with an inhibited ability, comparatively, to think in the long-term, results in things like jettisoning warp cores to facilitate a nuclear explosion which they can then ride the percussive shockwaves of to escape the pull of a dwarf star."

This was met with silence.

Spock thought, privately, and thought his father also believed, that the key to Vulcan survival was its embrace of Earthlings. Even now that Vulcan was gone, the Earthlings, more than anyone else in the Federation had taken its destruction as a personal insult. Money and resources had poured into the reestablishment of Vulcan upon their new chosen planet--much of it from civilians. It was easy, in the face of their penchant for gleeful destruction, to forget that Earthlings were also possessed of the capacity to be astonishingly kind.

Spock knew he could not say that the destruction of Earth would not have happened, if Nero had focused his wrath on that planet first. If he had to say, however, he might point out that historically Earth was less vulnerable, somehow. It was as though around that solar system was a beacon transmitting HERE AND NO FURTHER, in the tongue of every enemy. As though their own malevolence and gift for the unanticipated and gleefully sadistic was somehow tangible in space itself. Earth had, in Spock's own life, survived not one but two attacks, and he took his own comforts knowing that some of that must be in him too--a gift from his mother.

Spock had long ago given up his own pacifism. He believed in it, but could not justify participating in it, not when he was in Starfleet. Not when he was responsible for the lives of others so frequently. But Spock had no talent for destruction, not the way Jim did. Spock could be incited to rage and wrath, but Jim Kirk was rage and wrath and a bloody laugh and the shallow wheeze of a collapsed lung and the impossibility of the Earthling determination to always press forward, to never give quarter.

Spock wondered if his own ancestors had met the Earthlings and been charmed by them, pulled into the orbit of this young species which burned bright and fast, their lifetimes a fraction of Vulcans'. He did not understand how his father had been the first to marry one, though there had always been stories of Vulcans who left, and Spock wondered how many of those Vulcans had left their planet to pursue something else.

“How was the the interrogation?” Jim asked when Spock found him in the small room they had claimed as their meeting room. Jim insisted it had been a closet, but it had simply been a smaller conference room, and once Spock and Jim had established it as their preferred place of gathering, no one else had ever booked it. There was something comforting about that.

“You are infuriating,” Spock told him flatly as he sat across the chessboard from him. Jim’s eyes lit up that particular shade of blue before they were hidden behind long lashes.

* * *

"I'm not saying it's a great plan," Jim admitted, his body turned slightly into Spock’s, still sprawled in his chair. Spock did not think he even knew he did it.

"It is not a plan," Spock told him flatly. "It is the three of you considering something deeply outside of the laws of physics."

Nyota shot him a look, the way she did whenever he expressed reservations about any plan she had signed off on.

"If it was outside the laws of physics it wouldn't work," Scott said. "It’s just not known physics. I'll write a paper on it!"

As though Spock's concern was the academic implications, and not the fact that they were going to try to whip around a Class O star at Warp 10 to try to get back to their own reality.

"I like it," McCoy said, crossing his arms over his chest. It was impossible to tell whether he was being genuine or not, and Spock had long-since given up on trying.

Jim turned his blue, blue eyes to Spock, and Spock was aware that the rest of the crew was settling back to watch. That it was something of a past time to see how quickly Spock would cave on something, or if he would at all.

"Traveling through space and time," Jim said, wheedling. "I mean, look at it this way: we die if we stay, we die if we fail, but at least we're trying to leave if we fail instead of accepting our fates.”

Spock lifted a single eyebrow at him at the idea that Jim Kirk knew how to sit back and accept his fate.

"You think that your counterpart here would succeed in killing you?" Spock asked.

McCoy snorted. “Fat fucking chance.”

Jim paused. "Well--no. But I don't like it here, I want to go home, and so does everyone else, so let’s try to make that happen."

Spock turned to Chekov.

"Give me the plan again," he said, and the boy scrambled to hand Spock his padd. Jim grinned at him.

"It's gonna work, Spock."

"Captain, may I point out that you always say that," Spock said.

"I mean, I'm never wrong, though," Jim said, and Spock turned his eyes down to Chekov's calculations, because one did not stare at the sun without consequence, and Spock did not particularly enjoy comparisons to Icarus.

*

They were successful.

They were less successful at a Starfleet informal symposium at explaining why.

“Well, it was Class O,” Scott was saying, and Spock gave Jim one long, long look and went to intervene before Scott started ranting about how Starfleet was full of close-minded, academically-defunct idiots. Last time he did that--well, Jim wouldn’t tell him what he’d done with Admiral Archer but it had involved an opera box and if Spock thought about it too closely he wanted to murder Archer again.

Ben Sulu, who had grown up on Poladrius and then lived on Mars, and was Human but not Earthling, attempted to help Spock translate. He was a bioengineer, but frankly there were days Spock was simply glad of any assistance, especially because when the Earthlings got tired of feeling attacked (and they always, always wound up feeling attacked), they got obstinate.

Between them, Ben and Spock were able to at least keep Sulu and Jim in check, and Jim in check meant that both Scott and Chekov were, and Sulu in check meant Nyota was (it was a very strange phenomenon, but it seemed to be related to their mutual perception of each other as the coolest heads in the room, and so when one lost their temper, the other felt entitled to do so as well), so Spock counted it as a win.

“Yes, but--” Grax Kaojbfic protested, his tentacles quivering in confusion.

“Sometimes,” Spock interrupted, because Jim had that look like he was going to start becoming more and more outrageous and Spock would be regretful if he had to kill his Captain. “Sometimes, in the situations encountered in our voyages into uncharted space, the laws of science and reality are at best guidelines. We cannot profess to know everything, and regularly we are confronted with those things which seemed true, and are suddenly not. Innovation and chance and indeed throwing caution to the wind are sometimes a ship’s best hope for survival.”

“That was so hot,” Jim told him, before he left the conference room, waving to the boys at the desk and keying in his room number at the transporter. He grinned at Spock, and his tone implied a joke, but his eyes were that particular shade of blue, and the smile did not reach them before he ducked his head and vanished. Spock reflected that for all he was learning to speak Earthling, clearly more study was required, and it was important, always, to have a native speaker help one learn.

He keyed in Jim’s room number.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[PODFIC] Some Translation Required](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9127483) by [forzandopod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/forzandopod/pseuds/forzandopod)




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